Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Spending years in software testing brings me to write this.
One of the most common aspirations in a team which is involved in manual
testing is, “When do I get a chance to do Automation or Performance Testing”?
It also has a most common response, “We will see if there is a chance, we will
let you know, meanwhile why don’t you get trained on some tools from the
training department”. I do not have a count of it, but I have seen this kind of
conversation in almost every catch all meeting with senior management. I also
do not have statistics but I cannot be a million miles away if I say that its
back to normal after the session is over and figuratively it would not exceed 5
– 10% of the instances would turn out to be that the person has met aspiration.

It is a good sign that thought of getting technically
inclined has passed thru the mind but what is the effort put in to materialise
that thought into action. Well, the most common excuse would be I have attended
the trainings and repeated asked for change in the project but I was not
allowed to pursue my aspiration due to project pressures. Given the fact that
there are not many slots open for automation and performance even to these days
(agreed, we are making progress in improving automation; but I would bet all my
money on we are not where we wanted to be on automation front. Blame it on
timeline pressures, cost pressures where management thinks any spending on
testing is mere waste and testing is just done for the sake of it without any
real purpose or objective. I would prefer to stay away from that discussion for
now).

I believe that is enough said on the problem statement. Let
us now move on to the section that matters the most. What are the alternatives?
How can we stay technical even if the project does not have much to offer?

1)Excelling
in Excel: No matter what type of project we are working on, testing has
something always to do with excel sheets. It offers great features if you can
explore with VBA. For example, working on a project which has a lot of permutations
and combinations of test data to be used and you need to write optimum number
of test cases, generate them using a macro.

2)Make your
own reports: No matter how much of flexibility is provided by the Test
Management Tools, there is a definite need of tweaking required in your daily
reports, weekly reports or the test summary report. Often it is quite laborious
and by the time you finish your report editing, there is a strong likelihood
that facts would have changed in the tool, which makes the reconciliation task
before sending the report quite daunting and often ends up in a night mare.
Have you ever tried customising the reports with a single click using the
querying features of tools? (This seems more relevant if you are using HP ALM
or its predecessors, not to mention MS MTM which many test managers consider
ghost in the nightmare for its reporting capabilities). All you need for doing
this is basic programming skills and decent querying skills. Give it some fancy
name and logo; add it to the organization’s assets. You are celebrity!

3)Proof of
Concepts: If you have spare time in projects (don’t bother if you are
bragging about how difficult it is to manage with your “strict” deadlines),
ever tried doing a small proof of concept using a freeware tool (please ensure
you get appropriate permissions) to automate some of your daily tasks.
Management wouldn’t see that as a big crime (as long as you get right approvals
to proceed) if you can deliver them some time-off from the testing schedules.
Moreover, you can always boast about the effort savings by extrapolating the
figures. Win-win deal and you have some coding to do as well.

Well I guess enough of options
for who actually want to give it a shot. For those who look for more, would
never do it even with 1000 other options.
Better not bother about them. Apologies if that sounds to be sarcastic
and pessimistic. I am paid to be pessimistic :)